


between friendsville and gainesboro

by sublime_jumbles



Series: 'til there was no more coast to wander [2]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Asexual Henry, Belly Kink, Canon Compliant, Chubby Gansey, Cuddling & Snuggling, Eclipse 2017, F/M, Feeding, Feeding Kink, Gen, Hand Feeding, Hiccups, M/M, Multi, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Non-Sexual Kink, Overeating, Post-Canon, Post-The Raven King, Queerplatonic Relationships, Road Trips, Stuffing, The Raven King Spoilers, Weight Gain, asexual gansey, demisexual blue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 01:23:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11910297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sublime_jumbles/pseuds/sublime_jumbles
Summary: the solar eclipse coincides with blue's 23rd birthday. the gang's eclipse road trip coincides with tennessee. tennessee coincides with a lot of deep-fried desserts. it's a pretty good birthday.(in other words, the eclipse-themed kink fic absolutely nobody asked for, inspired bythis tweet)





	between friendsville and gainesboro

**Author's Note:**

> full disclosure: i have never seen a total solar eclipse, been to tennessee, or eaten a deep-fried oreo. i have, however, done so much research for this story that google maps now thinks i live in tennessee, and i have misspelled "deep-fried" as "deep-friend" approximately 8,000 times. please excuse all errors in these regards.
> 
> one million thanks to wy and jenna for cheerleading and beta reading!!! u r the best.

“It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Friendsville to Gainesboro,” Gansey observed over an enormous paper map spread out on the hood of the Pig. Henry, who was spread out on the roof of the car, head dropped over the windshield, eyes closed in deference to the oncoming eclipse, gave a delighted hoot of laughter.

“Is that not the area we already occupy all the time? That comfortable space between Friendsville and Gainesboro?”

Blue, squished between Gansey and the car in a way that was decidedly not unpleasant, braced her hands on the orange of the hood, so warm and radiant in the Tennessee heat that she half-expected her palms to sink into it like the one of the shower jellies Orla kept in small, colorful pots in the shower she shared with Blue and Jimi and a litter of cousins. “I think we’re more at the intersection.”

Henry nodded, the movement slightly ghoulish with his face inverted. “Fair enough, Blue Planet.” He flung out an arm, eyes still pasted shut. “Tell me if I land anywhere near where we should be.”

Gansey shifted against her back as he leaned forward, and she felt his stomach squish against the small of her back. He brought his arm around her to meet Henry’s on the map, and she made a little noise halfway between _oh, hello_ , and _oh, that’s nice_. “You landed in Alabama.”

“That legendary sweet home,” said Henry, sweeping out his hand again. “How about now?”

“You’re in Kentucky,” said Blue. Gansey rested his chin on top of her head, and she felt him sigh against her shoulders.

“Anywhere jumping out at you, Jane?”

They’d planned their second (“non-annual,” Henry had said, “although there’s a thought, o nomadic ones”) post-graduation road trip around the solar eclipse that been considerate enough to time its appearance with Blue’s twenty-third birthday. She had been thrilled when she’d first seen the date on Maura’s calendar of significant celestial events over a year ago, and although she did not like much to-do for birthdays, particularly her own, she was prepared to make a once-in-a-lifetime exception to celebrate this collision.

She had patiently Sharpied the eclipse into the calendar in her dorm room, and decorated the little square with a rainbow of cloud shapes, sunbursts, and squiggles. She’d made herself a pinhole camera to view it through, although Gansey had insisted on purchasing pairs of eclipse glasses online for backup, just in case. They had charted course from his apartment in Beacon Hill, the low hum of the ley line familiar in her blood, the scent of the ocean rolling in through his open windows. Blue was fresh from Oregon, her brown skin suntanned and freckled, the clean, pure smell of its Douglas firs still buoyant in her chest, and Gansey had kissed every spare inch of her as if he had not heretofore known that freckles could appear anywhere on her body.

Gansey had taken a satisfied delight in lining up their departure dates five years to the day, and Blue had sat back on her heels, playing with the untied laces of one of her turquoise high-tops as she took him in. She thought he’d grown a little taller since he’d left for college, and he’d certainly grown heavier, thanks to their first road trip, four years of cold Northeast winters full of comfort food, four Virginian summers full of Nino’s pizza and as much gelato as he could eat, and innumerable well-stocked care packages stamped from Manhattan and first Henrietta, then Portland once she'd transferred junior year. He’d gained the freshman, sophomore, junior, senior fifteen like clockwork, tempered by the hiking jag he’d been on since Blue had discovered the Arnold Arboretum and Blue Hills Reservation their sophomore year. To Blue’s great amusement, and possibly greater embarrassment, Gansey had also joined Harvard’s intramural inner tube water polo team, but having now borne witness to more inner tube water polo games than she ever thought she’d see, she wasn’t sure how much energy he really exerted playing the sport. As far as she could see, the real reward was watching Gansey float around shirtless and damp, pale stomach pooling over his crimson swim trunks, laughing and earnestly doing his best to do whatever you did during water polo.

His soft thighs had strained at his khaki shorts as he sat cross-legged on the hardwood floor of his bedroom, squinting at his phone as he plugged route after route into Google Maps, magenta polo pulled snug around the round, plush belly that had begun to sit in his lap. Blue had watched his lips move silently as he plucked another city off the map and typed it in, and reached over to rest her hand on his kneecap. He’d glanced up at her and smiled, his eyes bright and clear. He’d looked better-rested than he had in years, three weeks after Harvard’s graduation, his pulse alive, alive, alive beneath Blue’s fingers.

“Where do you want to watch it from?” he’d asked her, as Henry, who had Skyped in from Manhattan to help plan, hummed along to _Emotion Side B_ as he folded clothes on Gansey’s laptop screen. They’d planned to leave from Boston in two weeks’ time, stop to check out the family Gansey had read about online that performed miracles in Colorado, explore the national parks in Washington State, cut a path down to Texas because Blue and Henry wanted to visit Austin again, make a pit stop in Georgia to investigate that side of the ley line, and finally pull up to somewhere between Atlanta and Henrietta to catch the eclipse before heading home.

She’d consulted the map laid out on the hardwood; each of them were sitting on an edge of it to keep it from curling in the humidity. “Somewhere in the totality.”

Gansey had pushed his wireframes up on his nose. “Obviously.”

“Somewhere that’s not going to be flooded with eclipse-watchers.” Henry had given her a skeptical glance over Skype, and she’d made a face at him. “That’s a thing! There are eclipse tourists. I don’t want to have to deal with them, I just want to lie out in a field with the two of you and let the void overtake me.”

“Fair enough,” Gansey had said, as Henry had made a sound of approval. “I think Tennessee will be the best spot if we want to make that our last stop. It’ll be a closer route back to Virginia.”

Blue had already begun googling the path of totality, minimizing Henry’s Skype window momentarily to check the results. She’d been imagining the field she’d like to lie in to watch the solar event since she’d marked it in her calendar, but she hadn’t been able to pinpoint a location that seemed like it might be able to deliver on that fantasy. “Let’s drive through,” she’d said at last. “We can choose last-minute, see what looks the least obnoxious with people.”

“And so Jane has spoken,” said Gansey, as Blue had tapped the keyboard and Henry’s face filled the laptop screen once again.

“And so it shall be,” Henry had intoned, and then he and Gansey had gotten off on a tangent about whether or not it was tacky to stop and visit a hot spring. Blue had paused to text Ronan a picture of Red Boiling Springs on the map with the caption _I didn’t know you had holdings in Tennessee!_ , and then she had tuned back in to Henry and Gansey, submerging herself in the glorious pool of both their voices at once.

Now, T-minus 5 hours until the eclipse, they plotted their course in a gas station parking lot in Nashville. The eclipse would be visible here for just under two minutes, but Blue had already decided that she didn’t want to watch it from here. She had seen enough ten-gallon hats in the forty minutes they’d been here, and, as a very small person already irked by clothing designed to make tall people even taller, she had made several silent vows that she would not take even the smallest chance that the eclipse she’d been waiting on would be blocked from her view by someone else’s ten-gallon hat.

“Jane?” Gansey prompted, thumb pressed against his lip. “Keep going?”

She nodded. “Keep going. There’s too many people here already.”

“I figured,” said Gansey, and Henry added, “We’d look sick in cowboy boots, though. We have time to get some.”

“Do not,” Blue said, giving Henry the stink eye, then Gansey, “give him any ideas.”

“Which one of us?” Gansey asked, raising an eyebrow behind his wireframes.

“Yes,” said Blue.

She pointed to the thin strip of towns between Friendsville and Gainesboro, her arbitrary landmarks for her eclipse destination. “Henry, can you pull up that list of totality locations again?”

“I have to open my eyes for that.”

“You have five hours until that becomes dangerous, so pull it up fast.”

Henry slid his phone out of his pocket and got to looking, and Blue felt Gansey’s hand creep around her waist and find its way into the front pocket of her overall shorts. She tipped her face back to kiss him, the movement a groove in their record after five years of practice, and his lips caught her forehead, as they always did.

“I’m hungry,” he murmured, tipping his head down so she could kiss the soft line of his jaw. “You and Henry want to pick out some snacks before we go?”

She felt her cheeks flush. “Sure thing.”

On top of the Pig, Henry cleared his throat theatrically. “Adams,” he began. “Alcoa. Alexandria …”

Blue let him read until he pronounced the words _Crab Orchard_ , and then stopped him. “I’d like to watch my eclipse from Crab Orchard,” she said, bracing herself on an elbow against the hood so she could lean forward and tousle Henry’s spikes. “I can’t imagine that gets too much tourism.”

“Crab Orchard is the stone capital of Tennessee,” said Gansey conversationally, and both Blue and Henry turned to him with perfect imitations of the _oh really, Dad?_ expression Ronan reserved for Gansey Facts like these.

“What?” he said, shrugging. “It was in the guidebook.”

Henry shook his head affectionately. “I love you, Ganseyman.” He rolled off the roof of the Camaro with something a bit less than grace, then dusted himself off. “Did I hear one of you say snacks?”

Blue looped her arm through his as Gansey caught Henry’s other arm and planted a sloppy kiss on his cheek. “You did,” she said, “and I choose you as snack deputy. Gansey, will you find us a way to Crab Orchard?”

“So Jane has spoken,” he replied, dipping his head in agreement.

“And so it shall be,” said Henry, giving a decisive nod.

They browsed the gas station wares arm-in-arm. Between Blue’s kaleidoscope of hair clips, orange floral crop top, and true-blue overalls, and Henry’s cerulean-and-yellow striped tank top and snug white denim shorts, they were as garish as the snack packaging lining the shelves. Henry’s gold sneakers were so shiny that Blue was tempted to slide on her pink-and-green strawberry-shaped sunglasses whenever they caught the light, even indoors. Henry had bought a pair of sunglasses from the same flea market back in Austin, but his were shaped like pineapples. His fingernails, Blue’s fingernails, and Gansey’s were all painted the same rapidly-chipping shade of shockingly bright purple, which Blue had bought for ninety-nine cents in a drugstore in Nebraska.

“Any whims today, Blue Devil?” Henry asked, tilting his head until it bumped against hers. “I think I read something about Tennessee being one of the leading producers of fried Oreos in the nation.”

Blue’s heart skipped. “Oh, really? I don’t see any here.”

“Maybe not here, but certainly a side quest of sorts, no?”

“Certainly,” she agreed. She moved down the aisle of snack foods, chewing her lower lip as she tried to decide what she’d most like to see Gansey stuff his face with one-handed as he drove. She’d become something of an expert at pulling together gas station meals over the course of their first road trip, and prided herself on being able to assemble the healthiest possible smorgasbord, if necessary, or, more often, the highest possible calorie count.

She and Henry spotted the rack of Moon Pies at the same time, and they each darted out a hand to grab a package before grinning at each other.

“I don’t know what these are,” Henry said, inspecting the package, “but I sense a theme. I’ll grab the Sun Chips, you grab a box of those - what are those called? Galactic Snacks, just for kicks.”

“ _What_?”

“You know,” he said, gesturing with the package of Moon Pies. “Galactic Snacks. Those like, chewy fudge bricks with the sprinkles.”

She whacked him with her own package of Moon Pies, laughing. “You mean _Cosmic Brownies_ , you nerd.”

“You wound me,” said Henry, in a very good impression of offense. “I don’t appreciate that I wasn’t consulted before licensing that brand name. ‘Galactic Snacks’ has a much better ring to it. It’s got consonance _and_ assonance.”

Blue grabbed a six-pack off the shelf, laughing. “Come on. We have a finite amount of time to get to Crab Orchard before my eclipse hits, and _almost_ more importantly, we have to see if Gansey’s ever heard of Moon Pies.”

—

“What is this?” Gansey asked from the backseat, holding a Moon Pie up to his face.

“They’re local,” said Blue, and cackled at the _you’re shitting me_ look Gansey shot her. “No, I mean it, they’re made in Chattanooga or something. Calla used to bring them back when she visited family around there.”

“Calla eats these?”

Blue nodded, kicking her legs up onto the dashboard. “We should probably get her a pack next time we stop.”

Gansey took a careful bite, and Henry glanced away from the road for a moment to watch. Gansey chewed carefully, a quizzical look on his face.

“Kind of like a stale s’more?” he said, casting a glance between the two of them. “Not bad, just … strange.”

 _Strange_ didn’t stop his hand from dipping into them until he’d finished both packages in the two hours it took to reach Crab Orchard. Plus half the bag of Sun Chips, which Henry and Blue both helped with, and all but one and a half of the Cosmic Brownies - Henry and Blue each took one for nostagia’s sake, but Blue only made it through half of hers before the sugar began to make her teeth ache, and she passed the rest along to Gansey. She caught his eye in the mirror of her sun visor, and he gave her a clumsy wink before fitting the entire half-brownie into his mouth.

They drove in circles for a while, Blue keeping her eyes peeled for fields along the sides of the road. “Bat Town Road,” she read off a street sign as Henry slowed for a stop sign. “Heads up, I’m moving.”

Gansey and Henry laughed, and she felt Gansey’s hand nudge into hers in the space between the passenger seat and the door. She squeezed, and he squeezed back, and then Henry took a turn and let the Pig judder to a stop along the shoulder, the rough asphalt edging up against a field that was brown and crisp with summer, its grass shaggy and stale, but blissfully, wonderfully empty of people.

Henry turned down Bonnie Tyler as she wailed from the stereo. “Will this do?” he asked, his dark eyes hopeful, and Blue nodded vigorously.

“It’s perfect.”

“Bad news,” said Henry once they were out of the car, squinting at his phone through his pineapple sunglasses. “We accidentally drove out of Crab Orchard proper, but the _good_ news is that we’re in Rockwood, which is considered part of Greater Crab Orchard according to Google, and the _auspicious_ news is that it would seem we have landed on Pig Path Road.”

Gansey grinned, and it was so infectious that Blue could hardly be bothered by their change in location. “That _does_ seem auspicious.”

According to Gansey’s watch, which he’d been painstakingly resetting each time they crossed into a new time zone, they still had some time before the eclipse, and he used up a good ten minutes pacing circles in front of the Camaro, stretching his legs, as Henry and Blue perched on the hood and passed the half-gallon of iced tea they’d grabbed from the gas station back and forth.

“Did you know,” said Gansey, casually stretching his arms above his head as if preparing to distribute a casual Gansey Fact, “that the longest recorded eclipse to date was in 743 BC? It lasted for seven minutes and twenty-eight seconds.”

“Dang,” said Henry. “They must have thought the world was ending.”

“Can you imagine?” said Blue, eyes trained on the soft slip of stomach visible where Gansey’s butter-yellow polo had pulled up with his arms. “That’s gotta feel like a sign of the End Times.”

Henry smacked a kiss against her temple. “I think you’re experiencing your own End Times over there, hmm?” He passed her the iced tea. “Quench your thirst, my dear.”

She took a long slug, only half-listening as Gansey continued about historical eclipses. Henry was paying attention, whetting him with questions Blue was sure he’d know the answers to. She liked listening to Gansey’s tangents, his enthusiasm endearing and infectious, but at the moment she was preoccupied with the way his shirt had settled back over his stomach, bunching up a little at its crest, leaving that sliver of skin visible where it spilled over his belt. His shoulders had always been broad, but the rest of him had broadened as he’d gained weight too. He'd grown prettily pear-shaped, his hips the widest part of him now, and his thick waist swelled out softly where it had used to nip in at least a little. Blue was convinced that some of her life force dwelled in the twin dimples that had appeared at the small of his back as he’d softened. His cargo shorts fit more snugly now than they had when they’d embarked on this trip, and every time Gansey turned away from her to pace in a different direction, she felt a little jolt like an electric shock in her chest at how tightly they pulled across his backside, the way the tops of his thighs bulged out. He still stood with the same self-assured, straight-shouldered confidence he used to, but his posture was a little skewed now, his hips pulled back a little to balance the weight of his stomach. His thighs rubbed together when he walked - she'd spent many a Henrietta summer night kissing at the chub rub there - and the roll of his hips beneath that extra weight made Blue go cross-eyed with the urge to grab as many handfuls of him as she could. On his next turn around, Henry shot her a look that told her he was falling prey to the same phenomenon, and she took his hand to anchor them both.

“It’s a little stupid how good he looks sometimes, isn’t it?” Henry asked in her ear, and Blue lay her head against his bony shoulder and nodded fervently.

“Incredibly stupid,” she agreed. “Even worse that he manages to do it in those terrible boat shoes.”

“We should do something about that later,” he said. “His being stupidly good-looking, that is. Provided we’re not obliterated by the eclipse.”

She shrugged. “Either way we get obliterated, one’s just on our own terms.”

He laughed. “Ever the optimist, Bluestocking.”

They lugged the beach blankets Blue had packed deeper into the field and lay them out, overlapping two so they could all lie together. Gansey doused the two of them, and then himself, in bug repellant, swatting at the wispy necks of dead grass whenever they tickled at his calves. Blue perched her glasses atop her head, readied her pinhole camera in her lap, and tucked herself between Gansey and Henry. She lifted her camera and tilted her face back to watch the moon creep over the tremendous crescent of the sun, then, after a moment, lowered the camera and slid her glasses on. The sun through the lenses, she thought, exhilarated, was the same brilliant shade of orange as the Camaro.

She felt herself grab onto both of them, a thin handful of Henry’s tank top and a thick one of Gansey’s side, as the air began to darken. She slipped her glasses off as the moon and sun moved into totality, sunlight flaring into corona like fabric rippling across the sky, and drank in the sight with all her being. Somewhere around them, cicadas began to sing raspily, and Blue sank into the darkness, eyes only for the billows of light streaming above her, her chest caught between tight and unspooling like every emotion she’d ever felt had been distilled into waves of light and compressed into these two minutes.

She wrapped an arm around each of her boys, Henry lithe and firm, Gansey soft and yielding, and pulled them as close as she could. Her cheeks were damp, she realized, and she took shallow, jagged, joyful breaths, head thrown back as far as she could manage, until Gansey reached over and bumped her glasses back down her nose.

She pressed her cheek to his and found that his was wet, too. “Wow,” he said softly, and she nodded.

“I love it,” she whispered, reverent. “I was afraid it wouldn’t be magical after everything else, but … _wow_.”

He pressed a kiss into her hair. “Me too.”

Beside them, Henry had slumped all the way onto his back. “I’m in shock. I’m flabbergasted. I’m head over heels.” He paused to take a breath. “Do you think the moon would want to marry me?”

Blue settled onto her side, and Gansey eased down next to her. “Can we share her?” she asked Henry, settling her head on his chest. She felt Gansey roll onto his side too, his stomach filling the curve of her back, and he lay an arm over her waist. Henry laced his fingers with Gansey’s, and Blue could feel the inharmonious, uneven sounds of their breathing braided together, the wild, jubilant cadence of people who had witnessed spectacular things and were relieved to find that they had not lost the capability to be awed by other spectacular things.

They lay in silence for a while as the afternoon washed back into the sky, and then Henry, glasses still firmly in place over his eyes, said, “I think the three of us deserve a reward for not going blind today, hmm?”

Blue propped her chin on his chest. “A little RoboBee told me that Tennessee is the nation’s leading producer of fried Oreos.”

She felt Gansey stir beside her. “Is that so?”

“One way to find out,” said Henry, already worming his phone out of his pocket. “Wait, stay there, stay there. We haven't taken an eclipse picture yet and I refuse to deny my legions of Instagram followers any longer.”

He held the phone above them, and Blue scrunched up her face in a goofy smile as Gansey crowded his face next to hers. Once the shutter sounded, Gansey dropped a kiss on her neck, and she turned over to press a kiss into the dimple in his cheek, deeper now that his face had grown fuller.

They packed up, Gansey installing himself behind the wheel this time as Henry spread out in the back and Blue resumed her recline between the passenger seat and the dashboard. She took out her phone to begin researching the nearest purveyor of fried Oreos, and found Henry’s Instagram tag and a couple of pictures from Adam in their group text with Gansey instead.

 **officialhenrycheng** _IT DOESN’T GET MUCH BETTER THAN TRAVELING WITH MY SUN AND STARS, BUT TODAY WE ALSO SAW MY WIFE, THE MOON, AND SHE WAS LOVELY_

 **Text from Plant Boy Parrish:** _hope yall got to see something a little nicer than this. it was cool though. ronan didn’t look into the sun_

 **Text from Plant Boy Parrish:** _not for too long at least_

Attached were three pictures: a dapple of sunlit crescents and shadows against a sidewalk lush with overgrown grass; a tiny scythe of light caught on the back of Adam’s hand; and finally, Adam squinting into the front-facing camera of his phone, the eclipse barely visible behind him in a blaze of white. All three, Blue thought, were a very different kind of exquisite than the eclipse she had witnessed.

“Magnificent,” said Gansey when she showed him at a stoplight, breaking into a dazzled sort of grin. “Tell him he’s just as wonderful as the eclipse.”

Blue obliged.

 **Text from Plant Boy Parrish:** _gansey you already have a girlfriend and a boyfriend_

Blue read it aloud. “So I do,” said Gansey grandly. “But that doesn’t mean we need to pretend that Adam is anything less than magnificent.”

“I’m transcribing that verbatim,” said Blue, poking at her keyboard, “because it’s true.”

—

For as wild and charged as the eclipse had made her feel, Blue dozed off for the better part of an hour, and when she woke, she found the Pig racing down a highway that cut through what appeared to be thousands upon thousands of acres of mountains and trees, the air sweet and spiny with it. _Of course_ , she thought, a sleepy smile tugging at her mouth. _I wouldn’t let myself sleep through this_.

“Where are we?” she asked, turning to Gansey. He smiled soft and slow, reached over, and touched her hair, and when she glanced at it in the rearview, she saw that it was flat on that side from sleeping on it.

“Interstate 26 cuts through the Cherokee National Forest,” he said. “We thought you’d like that.”

Henry appeared in her periphery, and she turned to peck him on the cheek. “Thank you.”

“Of course, Blue Spruce.” He braced himself on the passenger seat with one arm and held his phone out to her. “Want to join me in my hunt for fried Oreos?”

“Absolutely,” she said, and they conducted their research over the center console, murmuring clannishly back and forth as Gansey gamely hummed to himself what sounded suspiciously like one of Henry’s favorite songs off of _Emotion Side B_.

“This one specializes in deep-fried candy bars,” Henry said into her ear, “but they list Oreos too. And Twinkies. _And_ butter. Although personally I don’t know if I have the stomach to bear witness to that particular reckless culinary choice.”

“Me either,” said Blue. “There are limits.”

“What's that?” said Gansey, tilting his head in their direction.

“Deep-fried butter,” said Henry, before Blue could stop him. “Thoughts?”

Gansey made the sort of sound Blue thought someone might make if they were trying to swallow a glob of fried butter. “I’d eat a lot of deep-fried stuff for you,” he said slowly, “but I think that might be a no.”

Henry nodded approving. “Bluebonnet and I are also unanimous in calling that a hard stop.”

Relief spread across Gansey’s face, and Blue giggled. “Glad to hear it,” he said, rolling the wheel beneath the heel of his hand. “If you do find those fried Oreos, though, I'm more than willing.”

“Oh, believe me,” said Blue, petting Henry’s spiky hair. “They're part of the plan.”

She'd worried, once they'd split up for college all those years ago, once they’d emerged from the chrysalis of the road trip and had gone out to make new lives for themselves, that he'd start to get self-conscious about the toll she and Henry had taken on his waistline. Maybe he wouldn’t want to begin his life at Harvard bearing the weight of their epicurean antics; maybe once appearances began to matter again he’d begin to doubt his own. Maybe he’d join the crew team and lose the weight, become slim and taut despite the number of times he’d told them he didn’t feel quite like himself without that buffer of padding. Most of all, she’d worried that his self-sacrificing streak would widen again, that he’d try to whittle himself down to feel like part of a crew team or a bicycle club or whatever it was that rich white people did in Massachusetts, anyway, trying to squeeze back into that narrow role of Richard Campbell Gansey III, Golden Boy.

But once the semester had kicked off, Gansey had leapt headfirst into his anthropology classes, and joined the history club and the naturalist club and speech and debate and Harvard’s TEDx partnership and godforsaken intramural inner tube water polo, and he’d called Blue at least once a week, voice bright and brimming with eagerness. He’d tell her something interesting he’d learned in class or in naturalist club, and he’d gained fifteen pounds before Thanksgiving without any interference from Blue or Henry, and Blue had delighted in how earnest and nerdy and _Gansey_ he was allowing himself to be.

Their antics had come up as they lay in a tangle on her bed at Fox Way over the break, she and Henry pressed against him, each with a hand up his shirt. He’d sent them plenty of unfairly compromising messages the day before, packed full of Thanksgiving food and trapped in a house packed full of relatives who wanted to talk to him about college and talk around his obvious weight gain. “You can just say it,” he griped to Blue and Henry, head tipped back against the cactus-shaped pillow on Blue’s bed. “It’s not like I don’t know.”

Blue had wormed closer to him. “We can stop,” she offered, her own stomach going hard. “If you don’t - it’s your body. It’s okay if you want to stop.”

He’d sat up a little, looking at her incredulously through his glasses. “Of course I don’t want to stop. Didn’t I send you all those pictures yesterday? If I didn’t like the way this looked or — or felt, I wouldn’t _flaunt_ it to you like that.”

Henry had made a little noise. “As long as you want to flaunt it, Ganseyboy,” he’d said, “we will gladly receive it.”

Gansey had grinned. “Besides,” he’d said, “if this semester is any indication, it would seem that I’m going to gain weight with or without you, and if you’re still offering, I’d much rather do it with.”

“What a relief,” Blue had said, lifting his shirt to kiss the thick pudge of his stomach. “I don’t know if I could sit through those inner tube water polo games without the incentive of admiring you all glistening and shirtless and jiggling like this.”

Henry had shimmied down next to her and grabbed at the rolls at Gansey’s sides, then run the flats of his palms over the soft fat. “Mmm, agreed,” he’d said. “Who even needs an inner tube with this gorgeous, glorious spare tire?”

Gansey had thrown his head back and laughed, and then he’d hauled them both up so he could pepper their faces with kisses, and Blue had let herself revel in the relief that he was okay, he’d been okay, he’d be okay, even miles and states and time zones away from them.

Now, Henry laughed and pinched one of Gansey’s cheeks gently, and he said, “Keep on I-26 for a while longer, and then we’ll direct you from there.”

Gansey nodded obligingly, and let himself be directed until Henry told him to take a left off the pebbly main street and the Pig ground to a halt in front of a diner that matched the Google result they’d been following.

“Well,” he said, and the way he drew out the word, the Virginia twang on it, made Blue’s chest swell. “That is indeed a sign in the window advertising deep-fried Oreos.”

“We made you a promise,” said Henry, tousling Gansey’s hair. “We delivered.”

He kissed him softly on the mouth, which was rare for Henry, and Blue’s chest swelled even larger.

“I love you,” she said, kissing Henry’s sharp jaw. “I love you,” she said, leaning across to catch Gansey on his temple. “Let’s go clog our arteries.”

They waited for a booth on a trio of skinny red vinyl barstools that delighted Blue in their tackiness. She perched on hers, kicking her legs idly, taking in the memorabilia plastering the walls — towering kayaking trophies, a terrifyingly kitschy rifle painted over with the Tennessee state flag, several horrible taxidermied snakes that she supposed must be local to the area, a collection of tea cups depicting what appeared to be war scenes — until Henry gently nudged her, his gaze on Gansey.

Gansey was scrolling through something on his phone, shifting his weight on his barstool as if he couldn't get comfortable, and it took Blue a moment to realize what Henry was pointing out: Gansey’s chubby hips were wider than the seat of the stool.

He noticed them staring after a moment, and his cheeks went pink. “These are very small,” he said, almost apologetically, and the whole of it was so irresistible that Blue slipped off her own stool and wrapped her arms around him from behind, bracing her chin against his shoulder and giving his stomach surreptitious pinches and pats until they were called for their table. She heard the click of Henry’s camera shutter and turned to make a face at him as Gansey laughed, and Henry took another picture and grinned approvingly.

“That one’s much better.”

They settled into a booth in the corner, Henry and Blue tucked into one side while Gansey occupied the other. All three of them pounced on the menus, and Gansey sat forward, forearms flat on the table.

“I,” he said, “am going to get a burger, because if I don't eat something that isn't sugar today I'll probably die —”

“Again,” said Blue and Henry together.

“— but you can pick it if you want,” he finished, the corners of his eyes crinkling. “You guys should also eat something that isn't sugar.” He smirked. “Blue hasn't had a vegetable all day, she might shrivel up.”

“Piss up a rope,” said Blue affectionately, flipping to the burger page. “Single burger? Double burger?”

He sat back and laced his arms behind his head like he was giving it serious thought, and she squirmed at the way it put his thick, soft upper arms on display. They still bore some of the bulk of his old crew muscles, but there was a layer of padding on top of those now, a few silvery stretch marks only visible when they caught the light. The old Welsh word for _remembered_ was tattooed on the inside of his right bicep in his hurried but deliberate scrawl, so that when his arm rested against his side, it was barely visible if you didn't know to look. He and Malory had spent months painstakingly searching for a translation that was accurate to Glendower’s time. Blue’s tattoo was along her ribs, in loopy letters that she’d designed to look as though they had many sorts of flowers growing out of them. Ronan’s was in Latin, block letters that curled into the tattoo that mapped over his back and shoulders, an endnote that still rang into silence, and Adam’s was stamped in the tiniest letters Blue had ever seen, tucked behind his deaf ear.

She tore her gaze away from his upper arms and focused on the menu, clearing her throat. “What was that? Double?”

“Nice try, Jane.” He brought his arms down from behind his head and covered her hands with his. “The more burgers you order for me, the fewer fried Oreos I can eat for you, so choose wisely.”

Blue and Henry looked at each other. “Single burger,” said Henry, and Blue nodded her agreement.

“Y'all catch the eclipse?” asked their waitress when she ambled over, snapping her gum.

Henry gave her his brightest, most beatific smile. “We sure did. And we didn’t go blind, so we’re going to reward ourselves with lots of dessert.”

She looked at him a moment, then nodded. “Whatever you say, hon. What’ll it be?”

Although even Blue’s veggie burger managed to give off an aura of distinct and perfect unhealthiness, she barely paid its taste any attention, because as they refueled on grease and salt and carbonated caffeine, Henry grew sillier and brighter, and Gansey grew louder and goofier, and Blue grew effusively, deliriously happy, her right hand laced with Henry’s in her lap, her left hand firmly clasped in Gansey’s on the table. The restaurant was humming with people and children and blaring country music from the speakers mounted on the wall, and ordinarily any of those would have been enough to annoy her, and yet. She had witnessed a total solar eclipse with two of the people she loved most, and she was at the end of her second cross-country road trip, and her boys had driven her through a national forest because they knew she’d like it, and they were eating terrible, wonderful burgers on the side of the road in Tennessee, and they were going to eat deep-fried Oreos, and tomorrow she’d be back at 300 Fox Way with the rest of the people she loved, and she couldn’t have dreamed a better way to spend her twenty-third birthday.

She watched Gansey push the last of his cheeseburger — heaped with avocado and bacon, because Blue Sargent, calorie curator, could still do a lot of damage with a single burger — into his mouth and chase it with a gulp of Coke, then catch a burp in his fist. He used his fork to stab at one of the steamed broccoli florets she’d ordered as her side, and she kissed her fingertips and reached across the table to press them to his lips as he chewed, which were still a little shiny with cheeseburger grease.

This was not the sort of establishment to have calorie counts printed on the menu — a feature Blue usually found equal parts infuriating, as they were an artifact of Diet Culture, and hugely thrilling, as she was interested in the exact opposite of Diet Culture — but she’d read enough menus with Gansey in mind to be able to estimate. “Congratulations,” she said, running her finger along his lower lip. “One thousand calories, down.”

“Mmmm,” he said, tapping a kiss to her chipping lilac fingernail. “How many in a deep-fried Oreo?”

Henry was already looking it up. “A surprisingly trim one hundred and fifty-six.”

“Huh,” said Blue. “What about those candy bars?”

Henry made a little noise. “Seven hundred.”

Blue also made a little noise. “Heck.”

Gansey laughed. “I guess I’ll just have to eat more Oreos, then. Think they make them with those triple-decker ones we found in Ohio?”

Blue nearly choked on the sip of orange soda she’d taken. The triple-decker Oreos clocked in at three hundred calories apiece, and once, in a hotel room in Cincinnati on their original road trip, she and Henry had lazily fed Gansey an entire package of them. He’d had a stomachache for hours afterward, but he remained adamant that it had been worth it.

Henry flagged their waitress and tapped at the dessert menu. “Can you tell us about these fried Oreos?”

“Baskets of three, six, and ten,” she said. “Ninety-nine cents each.”

“A steal!” said Henry.

Blue looked across the table at Gansey. “I can buy you three with the change in my wallet.”

He shot her a sly, lopsided smile, and she watched, the back of her neck prickling in anticipation, as he slipped his old money facade over his features. “I think we’d like a few more than three,” he said, and his accent leaned on the words more than usual, his gleaming politician’s-son smile spreading, his dimple thumbing its way into his cheek. “Say - ten Oreos, two deep-fried Snickers, two deep-fried Twix. And if I could get a glass of water …” He cast a mischievous glance at Blue, who bit down on her lip in anticipation. “And maybe a beer?”

“What kind?”

Blue almost giggled as Gansey faltered. “Uh —

"You want a list?" 

"No, no - just the cheapest one you've got,” he recovered, fixing Blue with another sly look. Gansey didn't drink often, but beer made him hiccup and he knew she liked that.

Once the waitress was gone, Blue exhaled. “You shouldn’t use your powers for evil like that. I thought I was going to combust.”

He grinned. “Just wait until you see me with an entire deep-fried Oreo in my mouth.”

Blue let herself slump into Henry. “We won’t survive.”

He popped a kiss against the side of her head. “But what a way to go, my loves.”

The Oreos arrived in a red plastic basket, round and golden and dusted with powdered sugar, looking a lot more appealing, Blue thought, than they had any right to look. The candy bars, at least, looked more unceremonious.

One of Gansey’s hands automatically went to his stomach, and Blue swallowed hard. She squeezed Henry’s hand as Gansey took his first bite of Oreo, and she felt Henry tense, too, when Gansey closed his eyes and moaned.

“Henry’s right,” he said. “If I die again, this is how I want to go.”

“‘If,’” said Henry and Blue at the same time.

Gansey shrugged. “You never know.” He fit the other half of his Oreo into his mouth and covered his mouth as he chewed. “God, these are going to be so heavy.”

“So are you,” said Henry, his voice gone low, and Blue heard the hungry little edge that only cropped up when they were feeding Gansey.

He put the next Oreo into his mouth whole, and Blue felt herself go a little faint watching his mouth wrap around it, the way his cheeks pushed out like he couldn’t get enough, like he had to have it all at once.

He chewed slowly, then chased it with a sip of beer, wincing at the taste. “Well, that's vile.”

Henry took it from him and stole a sip. “Yeah, that's PBR, all right.”

Gansey shook his head and picked up one of the candy bars and inspected it. “Should get the taste out of my mouth.”

He took a much larger bite than Blue was anticipating, a bit of caramel trailing out and catching on his lip. “Oh, wow,” he said, covering his mouth as he spoke. “That tastes like something Ronan would dream up.”

Blue laughed. “That wildly unhealthy, huh?”

The first time she'd visited him at Harvard, feeling tremendously strange and displaced in the stark brick and ivy of the city, she'd been thoroughly relieved to learn that his freshman weight gain hadn't been the result of eating poorly — she'd imagined him subsisting on the same diet of deep-dish pizza and Frappuccinos that had gotten him through Aglionby. But over the course of the weekend she'd spent with him, she'd realized that it wasn't that he was eating badly — it was that he was eating _so much._ Every meal they'd gone to in the giant Hogwarts-style dining hall, he'd gone up to the buffet at least twice, heaping his plate with so much food that Blue was sure he’d be down for the count the rest of the day, too full to take her on a tour of the libraries or show her the esplanade or do anything but nap. But instead he'd cleaned his plate each time, stretched and given Blue heart palpitations with the strip of flab he showed off each time he raised his arms, and led her on their way, and she'd marveled that maybe this was her and Henry’s doing. They'd fed him so much on that first road trip that maybe the expansion of his appetite was, in fact, their fault.

She thought about that now, watching him cram another fried Oreo into his mouth. He'd made it through half of them and two of the candy bars, although his beer remained largely untouched. His cheeks were a little flushed, his forehead a little damp, and he caught her eye, smiled.

“I have such a sugar rush,” he said, tipping his head back against the padding of the booth. “I'm going to crash in like an hour and it's going to be awful.”

“We’ll find you a bed,” said Henry. “You need your beauty rest, Ganseyboy, we’ll make sure you get it.”

Gansey took a sip of beer and shook his head as he swallowed. He hiccuped, closed-mouthed, and Blue squirmed.

“I'm going to need new clothes when I start that job in September,” he said, nudging her foot with his under the table. He’d taken a research assistant position with Harvard’s historical anthropology department, on the condition that he wouldn't start until he was back on campus to begin his Ph.D courses in the fall. “There's no way these are going to last.”

“Take us with you?” said Henry, stealing another sip of beer. “Since this is mostly our fault, after all.”

“You and my meal plan,” said Gansey fondly, breaking another candy bar in half and fitting it in his mouth. “I took Blue with me back in May to get some new shorts and she kept trying to put me in crop tops.”

“Can you blame me?” said Blue defensively, as Henry leaned across the table on his elbows to thumb a bit of chocolate from the corner of Gansey’s mouth. “I think you’d look great in crop tops. A loose floaty one? That little” — she used her hands to draw the swells of his sides in the air — “of your belly, hanging out underneath? Come on.”

“That _would_ look great,” Henry agreed, and Gansey blushed. “How are you doing there? Are you flagging?”

Gansey shook his head, swallowing two long gulps of beer and stifling a belch in his napkin. He put an Oreo in his mouth, chewed. “I'm doing okay. I'm _full_ , though, God. This is so rich.”

Blue watched Henry’s eyes go wide. Hearing Gansey talk around mouthfuls of food wasn't something she herself particularly enjoyed, but its impropriety thrilled Henry. He made a low sound beside her, and then made it again when Gansey sighed and slumped back a little, rubbing a hand over the soft swell of his gut.

“Oof. This isn't even that much,” said Gansey, and Blue gave him a skeptical look. “I mean, I've eaten more than this, right? Absolutely. But it's so heavy.”

“It's all fat,” agreed Blue, taking his hand and turning it over so she could knead at its palm and heel. “You probably gained five pounds from this meal alone.”

He laughed. “God, can you imagine? If I gained five pounds from every big meal I ate I wouldn't fit in the Pig.”

It wasn't a fantasy of hers to see him get quite that big, but it still sent a thrill through her to hear him talk about it so casually. Henry whined beside her, and he picked up the remaining candy bar and held it out so Gansey could take a bite.

“Those hips of yours are already looking a little snug in the driver’s seat,” he said softly. “Eat up, hmm?”

Gansey’s cheeks flushed even deeper. He hiccuped, and the sound escaped before he could throw a hand up to muffle it. “Oops,” he mumbled, and Blue felt herself ignite.

“You're almost done,” she said, running her fingertips over his palm. “You know this whole meal was, like, six thousand calories?”

He made the face he reserved for incredibly decadent food and incredibly old books - half reverent, half burdened by the knowledge of its existence. “It feels like six thousand calories.”

“And that's not counting the Moon Pies,” said Henry. “Or the Sun Chips. Or the Galactic Snacks.”

“The _what_?” said Gansey, and Blue giggled.

“Cosmic Brownies,” she said, and he made a face as if to say, _oh, of course_. “Or that giant Frappuccino you had with your bagel on the way to Nashville this morning.”

Gansey groaned, slumping toward the corner of the booth. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, I'm a glutton, I get it,” he said, but he had a self-satisfied little smile on his face.

He ate the rest of the last candy bar slowly, then the remaining Oreos, like he was purposefully trying to draw out the process to tantalize Blue and Henry. He kept drawing in deep breaths between bites, as if he were trying to will his stomach to make room for a few last bites of sugar and fat, and Blue could hear his exhalations across the table, heavy and soft.

Once he was finished, he sucked the sugar and chocolate off his fingers, then brought his beer to his lips and knocked it back in a few long, grimacing gulps. He sat back, and Blue and Henry sat forward, and he reached out for both of them as another hiccup burst out of him, loud and helpless.

“Shit,” he said quietly, his cheeks pink, and Blue laughed a little despite the crush of heat threatening to pull her under.

“You're cute,” she said, kissing the back of his hand. He dipped his head and hiccuped again, softer this time.

“Ow,” he murmured, and Blue and Henry looked at each other.

“Are you okay?” asked Henry, and Gansey’s mouth quirked up at the corner.

“I feel like I've gained - _hic_ \- four hundred pounds since I sat down here. But I'm okay. I'm _stuffed_ , but I'm okay.” He caught Blue’s eye and laughed. “Jane, your face says you want to be all over me right now.”

“I do,” said Blue, drawing out the word. “Let’s find a hotel so I can play with your belly until you fall asleep.”

He nodded. “And so Jane - _hic_ \- has spoken.”

Henry kissed Gansey’s fingertips. “And so it shall be.”

They paid the check - Gansey and Henry’s credit cards tucked into the fold with a twenty from Blue, as always - and Gansey groaned as soon as he tried to haul himself out of the booth. He peeled his thighs from the vinyl one by one, hiccuped, and inched himself to the edge of the seat. Blue and Henry held out their hands and pulled him to his feet, and he swayed a moment, bracing himself on the edge of the table.

“Oh, man,” he said softly, his other hand going to his belly. “I feel so - _hic_ \- heavy.”

“Mmm,” said Blue, sliding an arm around his waist, “you look it, too.”

Henry got under his other arm, and they made their way out to the Pig like a lazy six-legged creature. Gansey hiccuped again, and Blue felt his side jiggle against her. She was slowly being torn up with yearning to touch him, slip a hand up his shirt, kiss the underside of his stomach where it was striped with stretch marks. She wanted to feel the soft dough of his belly jump under her mouth when he hiccuped, and more than anything else she wanted to kiss that pretty mouth that had eaten all that.

“Backseat or shotgun?” Henry asked, and Gansey made a little sound like he couldn’t wait to plant himself _anywhere_ as long as it meant sitting down.

“Shotgun, I want to stretch out.”

Henry ducked into the back, and Blue watched Gansey ease into the front, tilt the seat back so he could slump down, his belly piling in his lap, and flick open the button on his shorts with a sigh of relief. He gave a whining little belch at the respite from standing, and it made Henry whine in the backseat too.

Blue took a deep breath, catching Henry’s eye in the rearview and then glancing at Gansey. The way his polo was clinging, she could see the two rolls that stacked up when he sat down, and she resisted the urge to poke them as she slid into the driver’s seat.

He hiccuped as she turned the key in the ignition, his eyes closed, his head tipped back, and she poked him anyway. His lips curled into a smile, and he reached over and poked her back, in the little gap of brown skin between her crop top and overalls.

Gansey continued to hiccup until she pulled off the highway toward the hotel Henry had found online, and each time he shifted even the smallest bit in the passenger seat, he made a little noise of exertion. Blue’s hands were tight around the wheel, and she was beginning to count down the minutes in the car according to Henry’s GPS app until she could sink them into Gansey’s stomach instead.

She exhaled even louder than Gansey when they pulled into the lot, taking his hand over the center console and squeezing. Henry shouldered their bags and volunteered to charm some sort of luxury suite out of the concierge, and left Blue to supervise as Gansey extracted himself from the car.

He moaned as he stood up, although Blue thought it sounded more dramatic than earnestly suffering, and he leaned against the car with one hand splayed as wide as it could go across his stomach. He closed his eyes, fished an arm around her waist and pulled her close, and then gave the crown of her head a long kiss before pulling away to belch.

“Dang,” she said, and even in the twilight, she saw his cheeks color a little. “So rude, aren’t you?”

“I didn’t think that would be so much food,” he said, tracing his fingernail along the bare skin beneath the hem of her crop top. She shivered, grabbing a handful of his waist for purchase. He burped again, soft and breathy, and she made a little noise of disbelief.

“A burger and fries, ten fried Oreos, four fried candy bars, and a beer, and you didn’t think you’d be full?”

“Not _this_ full,” he conceded as they walked toward the hotel entrance. “It didn’t seem like _that_ much food.”

“I think your perspective has become extremely warped,” she teased. “Your appetite is too big for your own good.”

He pulled her closer, leaning on her a little. “Should I eat less? Shrink it down a little?”

Blue shook her head adamantly. “Absolutely not. I love you and your big appetite. I love a boy who eats everything that’s put in front of him and still asks for more.”

He laughed. “You only love me for my gluttony.” He dropped another kiss on her head. “I love you too.”

“I know.”

Henry met them inside, jubilant at having talked the concierge into a room with a jacuzzi in addition to a king-sized bed, despite having lost out on a luxury suite. “Onward and upward,” he said, shepherding them into the elevator. “Ganseyman, how you doing?”

Gansey nodded. “At the moment there seems no greater earthly delight than lying down.”

“Soon enough,” said Henry, bracing a hand on Gansey’s waist and leaning in to kiss him. “So full of treats,” he murmured, rubbing at his swollen stomach, and Gansey let out a soft moan that went straight to Blue’s knees.

Gansey flopped back onto the bed almost as soon as Henry had gotten the door to their room open, and let out a long, rumbling belch, cradling his stomach in his hands. “Finally,” he breathed, and Blue jumped up on the bed beside him. His cheeks were still flushed, and his hazel eyes were sleepy, and the way he was lying made his chin double more than it usually did. She bunched herself up beside him and kissed at that softness, and he wrinkled his nose, smiling.

“Come here,” he said, opening his arms. “Both of you.”

Henry stripped to his boxers and changed his tank top out for one of Gansey’s worn Harvard T-shirts, a few sizes too large for Henry’s slender frame. He took a flying leap onto the bed and landed dangerously close to Blue’s legs, Gansey groaning with the movement. Henry laced his fingers with Gansey’s and then cupped Blue’s face in his free hand, tipping her head back so he could kiss her, and after a few moments of chaste, sloppy kissing, he turned onto his side and tugged up Gansey’s shirt until he found the spot there that he wanted to kiss.

While Henry was busy, Blue slipped off the bed to change, pulling a pair of her own boxer shorts from their luggage, hopelessly intermingled with the boys’ by now, pulled off her bralette, and wriggled into one of Henry’s NYU tank tops. She crawled back between them, and the way they made room for her was routine, practiced. She draped herself over Gansey’s wide thighs and pushed his shirt up to his softening chest, and chose a little spot below his navel to nibble a bruise.

He gave a little yip of surprise, and she looked up. “Okay?”

He nodded, chin bunching up. “Just couldn’t see you coming over all this.” He patted his belly, and Henry and Blue groaned over each other.

“Dude. That’s a totally unfair thing to say. That’s so _much_.” Henry shifted to kiss a patch of skin on Gansey’s bicep as loudly as he could. “You’re definitely going to bust those pants if you keep eating like this. Look.” He lifted the hem of Gansey’s polo to point out the way his stomach had pushed the zipper of his shorts all the way down. Gansey instinctively squirmed away at the touch over his boxers, but relaxed when Henry moved his hand back to Gansey’s stomach.

“Hmm,” said Blue, nosing at his love handles. “We still have two weeks in Henrietta before he goes back to Boston. I’m sure he could outgrow them by then, if we helped.”

Gansey half-laughed, half-hiccupped. “Do you think you still get that employee discount at Nino’s? Every time I walk by the one in Beacon Hill it makes me homesick for the _real_ Nino’s. I bet I could do some damage with some of those pizzas.” He brought up a hand to stroke the back of Blue’s hair. “I could probably do two in one day if you helped. One pizza, a nap in between, the other pizza, and then nap for the rest of the day.” He burped. “God, I feel like I swallowed four tons of cement.”

“Very sexy,” said Blue into his stomach. Henry scooted up on the bed so he could kiss Gansey on the mouth, and they made out languidly as Blue left a daisy chain of bruises along the lower curve of Gansey’s belly. She ran a hand up and down the insides of his thighs, where muscle gave way to pudge. His thighs and calves were strong and sturdy from months of hiking, but he was heavy enough that they were well-padded, too.

She felt his stomach jump with another burp or hiccup, and he and Henry broke apart, giggling. Henry propped himself on an elbow and began stroking Gansey’s hair, and Blue crawled up as far as she dared without putting extra weight on Gansey’s stomach. She worked her hands over him, jiggling and grabbing and prodding at him, and he groaned, plump hips arching under her touch. She loved seeing him overly satiated like this, indulged until he could be indulged no more, dipping beneath the surface of pleasure.

Finally they settled together, Gansey kicking his shorts to the floor and tossing his polo after it, spreading out on his back. Blue tucked herself on his right, one hand still sunk into the warm fat of his waist, and Henry lay on his left, one arm thrown across Gansey’s chest protectively, and in the chilly air-co of the hotel room they whispered and giggled under the covers until they went quiet one by one, Gansey’s shallow, overfull breaths and the soft gurgles of his stomach as he digested the only sounds left.   

Blue wasn’t sure anyone was awake when the clock crept toward the last minutes of her birthday, but she cleared her throat anyway. “This is it,” she said softly, and she heard Henry’s _hmm?_ first, and then Gansey’s.

“This is it,” she repeated, her voice heavy with drowsiness. “The intersection of Friendsville and Gainesboro,” and the last sounds she heard before she dropped off to sleep were their laughter.

**Author's Note:**

> intramural inner tube water polo is a very real sport that exists at harvard university and i beseech you to perform a google image search because every single hit is 24-carat gold. additionally, it is important to mention that this sport was specifically designed so people could play water polo while expending less energy than they would playing regular water polo. this is literally on the wikipedia page. also, harvard university has 13 dining halls. thank you for reading!
> 
> ***ahem*** a non-kinky version of this fic with new content is also available [here](http://archiveofourown.org/works/12027654). please don't leave any kinky comments on that one, THANK!


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